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British-born singer Paul Rodgers, who has lived in British Columbia’s Okanagan region for the last 15 years with Canadian-born wife Cynthia, walked onto the stage of his Canadian Music Week celebrity chat on Saturday afternoon carrying a hockey stick.

“Of course, new citizens have to carry this around all year - don’t they?” said Rodgers, 62, best known for his tremendous vocals in such bands as Free, Bad Company and The Firm.

Rodgers, who has recorded 30 albums with close to worldwide sales of 90 million since 1968, became a Canadian citizen in October 2011 during a swearing-in ceremony in Surrey, B.C., with 200 others and even lead them in a rendition of the Canadian national anthem.

“In fact, the mic actually blew up,” said Rodgers with a smile. “I started singing and it went.”

Rodgers arrived at CMW for an hour-long celebrity chat and two song acoustic performance - Feel Like Making Love and Seagull. He was fresh off three dates in Kelowna, Coquitlam, and Victoria, B.C. and will continue touring with U.S. dates in March and European dates in June.

He told a few hundred fans in the ballroom at the Fairmont Royal York hotel that following the release of his race horse sanctuary charity single, With Our Love, he’s hoping to work on a Stax blues record, and record six songs from his back catalogue with the Czech Bohemian Orchestra.

Otherwise, Rodgers - who really should write a book - told some pretty amazing tales to interviewer Jeff Woods.

Among the groups who wanted to recruit him, were Deep Purple and Journey, but he was involved with Bad Company by that point, and even the post-Jim Morrison Doors but they apparently couldn’t find him in England.

Rodgers, in his Free-era also gave good advice to a pre-Led Zeppelin Robert Plant advising him to “take a percentage” instead of a weekly pay cheque, and later formed The Firm for just two years, two albums, with a post-Led Zeppelin Jimmy Page with a handshake, no contract.

He also advised a solitude seeking Joe Walsh in the mid-’70s, when they were both in Malibu, to join the then-rising California rock band The Eagles.

“Why don’t you go into a rehearsal with them and then go disappear in the woods,” said Rodgers. “And the next thing I knew, it was Hotel California. They obviously made a connection.”

Known as The Voice to his fans, Rodgers said he grew up admiring soul-blues singers John Lee Hooker, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, James Brown, and was also a later admirer of Rod Stewart’s vocals.

He also said early success drove apart his first major band Free.

“Free - I miss that band - but when I look back, we were very young,” said Rodgers. “All of the sudden we had this monster hit (All Right now) and I don’t think we were ready for it all.”

And it was drugs, ultimately, that split up Bad Company.

“It was all around me, so it was almost normal, you just did whatever was there, there was a lot of cocaine, there was a lot of drug around and I, yeah, sure like everybody else, but I did draw the line at one point and in a way that’s probably what split Bad Company and myself. I stopped all that. And all of the sudden I felt like the outsider.

And it was a strange feeling. And I was going, ‘You don’t have to hide it all the time. Just do your thing. I’m not criticizing. I’m not judging.’ But I think it’s one of the things about that stuff is that it can make people a little paranoid too about people that aren’t doing it. You’re like the policeman.”

Rodgers summed up of how he measures success: “By how happy I am and how free I feel every day.”